Social Media Strategy Review: Indian Jewellery Brands

India is one of the biggest markets for jewellery. With tons of brands, big and small, competing with each other, social media should be an interesting battlefield for them to grab the attention of their target audiences.

In order to study how major Indian jewellery brands are leveraging social media for their marketing, I decided to review the activities of the following brands on major platforms.

Amrapali Jewels

Caratlane

Gemstone Universe

Kalyan Jewelers

Malabar Gold

Platinum Day of Love

Prince Jewellery

Tanishq

TBZ

Keep reading to know how these brands stack up against each other on Social Media.

Community Building

Looking at the way these brands have gone about building their community size, I think they are still trying to find ways to maximize their social media returns. They have taken a cautious approach and haven’t gone all out trying to acquire fans & followers.

Tanishq, Caratlane & Platinum Day of Love are leading the pack on Facebook with the rest far behind them. It does look like these brands have found something that is working and the other brands are missing out.

Prince Jewellery is a late entrant and is on a fan acquisition spree (clocking a staggering 75% growth rate) in an effort to catch up with all of them.

I would really like to see Amrapali Jewels, Malabar Gold and Diamonds, TBZ, Joyalukkas etc. to start acquiring fans and start building community around them which they can leverage during the next wedding season.

The situation is little different on Twitter though. Tanishq is being marginally led by Gemstone Universe, while Caratlane has been left behind by Amrapali Jewels.

Kalyan Jewellers, however, has started building its Twitter community big time and grew by almost 90%. A closer look at its community growth trend revealed that it acquired most its followers around March 20-22 when it ran the #KalyanJewellersInDelhi campaign. But most of them are contest hungry people, so I am not sure how it will help the brand.

Other brands, however, must note the aggression displayed by Kalyan Jewelers and should look at tinkering with their strategy.

Content Strategy

Broadly speaking, I found that most of these jewellers are selling the product they offer instead of selling the brand. In the luxury space, you should be selling your brand’s core values in order to attract customers because people won’t but a product just by clicking on a link.

You need to make them aspire to associate with your brand. Let me take you through the content activities of each brand.

Amrapali Jewels

The content strategy for Amrapali Jewels involves a lot of images of celebs featuring their jewels. It looks like the jeweller is putting a lot of resources in to product placement to highlight on social media and in other marketing materials. While this is a nice way to strike a chord with the audience, the updates lack a focus on branding; the captions fail to convey the brand’s ethos or personality.

Moreover, the updates need to be interactive and engaging in nature.

Twitter follows the same content strategy as Facebook. But they also Retweet a lot of tweets that praise their products.

Caratlane

The Facebook page of Caratlane is updated several times during a day. In fact, Caratlane was the most prolific pages in the period studied as it shared more than 120 updates in just 30 days!

The updates, although, have good images but just like Amrapali, it needs to focus on branding

An overdose of self-promotion updates with no good copy has ensured that it lacks engagement.

It did run several contests on Twitter though, which helped engage quite a good number of people. Otherwise, it is not very frequent with its proactive tweets.

Gemstone Universe

I like that fact that it has tried to keep its content around gems, astrology, fate & future. And it also shares some really useful information that can be used by its target audience.

Having said that, I think it can do with some more innovative copy in these updates and make it more interesting. The quality of creatives can be improved a great deal as well.

Although I did notice that of late, it’s posting random content which doesn’t make any sense to either the brand or its offerings.

Content on Twitter is simply cross-posts of Facebook which should not happen at any cost.

Kalyan Jewellers

While most of their content revolved around their new store openings and the blogging contest, there were a handful of broadcast updates with some really good creatives. Copy of these images can definitely be improved and elements of interactivity can be included in it.

On Twitter, I was impressed to see it using Vine videos during the store launch in Delhi.

It also ran an extensive contest during the store launch with the hashtag #KalyanJewellersInDelhi which lead it to garner almost 300 followers.

Malabar Gold and Diamonds

Most of its content is not different from others but they did leverage Women’s Day & Holi to the fullest with specific campaigns around them.

There are some good engaging post as well, but what caught my eye was its use of Slideshare to share tips!

It felt nice to see a luxury brand try a platform that is primarily restricted to B2B segment.

Toning down the self-promotional nature of its updates will definitely help it.

Platinum Day of Love

Possibly the best of the lot in terms of content. The brand has managed to strike a balance between being interesting and conveying the brand’s positioning. The strength lies with great copy which is supplemented effectively by elegant creatives.

Campaigns such as Share Your Love Stories and Places of Love have boosted their branding amongst their target audience

In all this, I wonder why they don’t have an active Twitter presence.

Prince Jewellery

I was surprised to Prince Jewellers sell products more than selling the brand; so much so that it included the product ID of its products within the caption!

There are no attempts at trying to interact with people as well. Since Prince Jewellery is ramping up its fan acquisition on Facebook, it needs to improvise its content quickly.

Interactive posts, which are shareable in nature, will definitely help. They also need to stop cross posting their Facebook updates on Twitter.

TanishQ

Tanishq’s updates have some really catchy designs but some get more engagement than others. They need to do less of the self promotional posts and start building strong relationships with their audience.

They did put in a lot of effort to market their #SnapOutOfIt campaign around Women’s Day and it seems to have paid off and worked out very well for them. The idea is good and the heavy promotion ensured that it saw a good response.

Tanishq tweets very infrequently on Twitter, which was surprising and is not as good as it is on Facebook. Almost always in broadcast mode, it hasn’t made any attempts to engage with its followers.

TBZ

I can’t write much about their content strategy because there is not much activity on their page. There only a handful of updates and some of them are just updates from their blog. I appreciate the use of blog but they need to stay consistent.

Their entire content strategy can do with several shots in the arm to jumpstart it in to life.

Community Engagement

On Facebook, it’s quite evident that Prince Jewellery is leveraging promoted posts to drive up engagement. Since it’s acquiring fans at great speed, it seems it has also started promoting its Facebook updates.

Malabar Gold & Diamonds and Amrapali Jewels are also able to drive up decent engagement numbers. I am pretty sure that Platinum Day of Love can get an even bigger engagement score if it starts leveraging Facebook’s advertising offerings.

Tanishq & Kalyan Jewellers can get a great boost if they make subtle changes in their content strategy, as mentioned earlier in the report.

On Twitter, since these brands are engaging with the help of contests, they have managed to strike good engagement rates. Kalyan Jewellers has been the biggest beneficiary of this with its contest around the Delhi store launch seeing a humungous response!

But the fact remains that engagement numbers gained via contests are not what brands should look at. Generating engagement via interesting and shareable content is the way to go.

Sentiment

Sentiments around these brands are mostly positive in nature with very little negativity. When you are positioned well in the luxury segment, there is very negativity about you; unless you end up in a PR crisis but since these brands have good quality products, there is very little negativity.

On Twitter, the sentiment is measured on the basis of the tweets the brand replies to, and since most of them don’t interact with people on Twitter, it’s difficult for us to analyse the sentiment; but I can safely assume that it will be same as Facebook.

Conclusion

As you can see, these brands are yet to adopt social media in all its entirety. They are still a little skeptical and are apprehensive to go all out with an effective strategy.

I would suggest these brands to take a leap of faith and jump headlong into social media as it has the potential to propel them to great heights.

With content that establishes their brand positioning and ensuring that there is constant interaction, I see no reason why they can fail on social media.

A digital marketing guy since 2008, I have helped several startups, SMBs and brands. Mad about analytics, data, social media and idli-sambhar. An engineer who fell in love with digital at the first sight. Follow my thoughts on Twitter at: @RakeshTheKumar